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OUR PROGRESS-IDEA 
AND THE WAR 

An Essay Concerning Recent Literature 
GEORGE ROY ELLIOTT 




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BOSTON : RICHARD G. BADGER 

The Copp Clark Co., Limited, Toronto 



Copyright, 1916, by G. R. Elliott 



All Rights Reserved 



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The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 
MADE IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 



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©CI.A446904 






Our Progress-Idea and the 
War 

THE process of retrospective inquiry set 
afoot by a great war has two phases: 
the world's scrutiny of the nation at the 
centre of the struggle, and the world's 
scrutiny of itself. The first phase is just now fully 
operative, with Germany under the world's micro- 
scope; but the second is still inchoate. Like Ger- 
many today, France seemed a century ago a thing 
strangely isolate: the thought of other nations was 
preoccupied with the astounding divergences be- 
tween her ways and theirs. But presently the 
world found that, in scrutinizing France, it had 
been brought face to face with itself. Europe saw 
that old sins of its own were being expiated in the 
upheaval induced by the Revolution; and that cer- 
tain ideas, more obscurely at work in its own mind, 
had been carried in France to their logical and vio- 
lent extreme. A similar situation must presently 
be faced in regard to Germany. And the discovery 
is bound to be made that the world's responsibility, 
in this case, is much more extensive, inasmuch as the 
relationships between nations have manifoldly in- 
creased and tightened since the eighteenth century. 

5 



6 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

New regions, including our own land, have been 
twined into the strands of world-thought. All coun- 
tries under the shadow of European civilization have 
been netted in an intricate web of idea and influ- 
ence; and the node called Germany has been drawn, 
during the past hundred years, ever nearer the cen- 
tre of the web. 

Keen and fruitful realization of this responsibil- 
ity is still far from us. The general mind is in- 
deed aware that certain specific tendencies, now un- 
happily strong in Germany, have been more or less 
at work, for some years past, in all the leading na- 
tions. But these recognized tendencies are com- 
paratively superficial. Beneath them one must seek 
the international condition of human nature from 
which they grew. There are many evidences that 
this condition is still vastly obscure to the general 
eye. Consider, for instance, one of the many popular 
dicta in regard to Germany which the past two 
years have produced: "She is fearfully and won- 
derfully different from the Germany of Goethe." 
In this exclamation resides a deeper irony than that 
intended. The Germany of Goethe has become 
the Germany of today in essentially the same man- 
ner as that in which the England and America of 
his time have become the England and America of 
today; the difference between past and present in 
Germany, though more striking than in other na- 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 7 

tions, has no exclusive quality of its own. 

Every year added to our perspective makes more 
evident the widely representative character of 
Goethe. The apical position of Shakespeare in the 
Renaissance which initiated modern times, became 
Goethe's position in what may be called the Sec- 
ond Renaissance, — the great movement which rose 
in the eighteenth and exhausted itself in the latter 
part of the nineteenth century. 1 In the literature 
of the Second Renaissance, and notably in Goethe's 
work, we can best discern the stage of culture im- 
mediately preceding our own. 



^he Second Renaissance comprises of course the so- 
called Romantic Movement in literature, and much else. 
As for the chronological terminus : it is sufficient to note 
that the bulk of the best literature dominated by the 
Second Renaissance spirit was complete by the eighth 
decade of the century. 



I 



AT first glance it seems an unwarrant- 
able assumption that an age which we 
may call our own — beginning, roughly 
speaking, some fifty years ago — can be 
so clearly distinguished from the Second Renais- 
sance proper. The main ideas of the earlier period 
are still with us. Prominent among them is the 
one denoted by such terms as progress, develop- 
ment, and evolution in the broadest sense of the 
word. The conception of human life, both in the 
race and in the individual, as inherently in a state 
of evolutionary progress was a main theme of the 
Second Renaissance. A necessary complement of 
it was the idea of mankind's solidarity: the belief 
that a homogeneous life is working in all men, lat- 
ently capable of transcending racial and national 
differences. Together with this complement, the 
idea of evolution was central in Goethe's thought 
and art, and he was aware of its epochal import. 
It is scarcely necessary to mention the evolutionary 
trend of his "philosophy," or the significance of his 
Faust as an epic of spiritual evolution in the indi- 
vidual life. As for the solidarity of mankind: one 
reads w T ith strange emotions now the following pas- 

8 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 9 

sages in a letter of Goethe's to Carlyle, written in 
1827, when the Second Renaissance was in its ma- 
turity: — "It is apparent that for a considerable 
time the efforts of the best poets and other artistic 
writers of various nations have been directed upon 
the qualities common to all mankind. In every 
special field, be it history, mythology, or fiction, the 
universal is seen to illuminate and shine through 
that which is national and individual. And since 
in practical life a like tendency is now' active, wind- 
ing its way through crude worldliness, through all 
that is unruly, cruel, false, selfish and hypocritical, 
and seeking everywhere to diffuse a certain amenity, 
we may hope, not indeed that universal peace will 
presently be instituted, but nevertheless that strife 
which is unavoidable shall become less and less 
bitter, warfare less savage, victory less insolent. 
. . . . We may best arrive at a genuinely uni- 
versal toleration by letting the peculiarities of indi- 
vidual persons and peoples rest on their own merits, 
at the same time holding fast to the conviction that 
genuine worth is distinguished by this mark: it be- 
longs to mankind as a whole. To such mediation 
and mutual recognition the Germans have long 
been contributing their share." 

The idea of evolutionary development with its 
various corollaries was diffused, primarily because 
of the time-spirit itself but partly because of the 



10 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

large influence which Goethe's work began to exert 
upon certain leading writers of the century, through 
the best literature of Germany, France, England, 
and even America. Carlyle and Emerson caught it 
up and grafted it upon the hardy stock of Puritan 
morality. It lent direction to the broodings of 
philosophical poets such as Shelley and Browning. 
It was popularized in Lockesley Hall, In Memo- 
riam, and a vast mass of poetry and prose with the 
like broad appeal. It appeared in widely different 
modes ranging from popular novels to unpopular 
critical essays. The idea was of course not new. 
But the Second Renaissance gave it intellectual and 
emotional catholicity, and thus brought it into a 
novel prominence. It became a criterion of ideas 
advanced in the leading departments of thought. 
Men endeavored to test the value for human pro- 
gress of every factor at work in the complex of 
modern civilization. 

Obviously, men have continued to do so; but in 
a more sophisticated manner, and with the increas- 
ing conviction that the progress-idea has taken root, 
during our time, in firmer ground than in the naiver 
day of our grandfathers. With such new guise the 
progress-idea appears, for instance, in Swinburne's 
Prelude to his Songs Before Sunrise, 1 87 1. The 
author might well be conscious, in this poem, of 
preluding in ringing tones a rising age. The revised 



Our Progress-Idea and the War II 

attitude toward progress has increasingly character- 
ized literature, down to recent writings of G. B. 
Shaw and contemporaries. And this literary utter- 
ance is merely the clear and sometimes extreme 
formulation of what has been going on more vague- 
ly in the general mind. Here, the progress-idea 
has been brought to earth more determinedly than 
ever before, has become joined with an unprece- 
dented desire to overcome actual conditions that 
hinder progress. In this new form, the idea has 
inspired ever-widening circles of propaganda, social, 
political, ethical, — including the peace-propagandum. 
International peace, — which for the Second Renais- 
sance proper remained a vision, as Goethe's observa- 
tions quoted above would suggest, — became for us 
a near and practicable goal. 

Yet in spite of this widespread actualizing ten- 
dency, there is just now a feeling, bound to deepen 
with every passing month, that our idea of progress 
is in some way ineffectual. This feeling is different 
from the initial shock of the War which mined our 
faith in the peace-propagandum. It rises from the 
contemplation of the enormous energy which the 
struggle has evoked in the warring countries, and 
which every day further confutes the initial prophe- 
cies that exhaustion would soon bring on the end. 
How will the final sum-total of this energy, we 
ask ourselves, compare with the total energy which 



12 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

all the progressive propaganda of the past half cen- 
tury, including the peace movement, have been able 
to enlist? It is this comparison which is stimulat- 
ing within us, consciously or not, a conviction that 
the progress-idea in our time has been less effective 
than prominent, professedly actualistic and yet in 
the main haltingly theoretic. 



II 



WHAT are the conditions of the de- 
sire for progress when it is most 
fruitful? The answer may be found 
in the history of literature, and espec- 
ially of that inner sphere evincing the emotional 
quality of belles-lettres. For in spite of a current 
theory to the contrary, bred of the popularization 
of rational processes, the representative function of 
poetry and artistic prose has not departed, and can- 
not depart, with the intellectual advance of man- 
kind. One may claim that, broadly speaking, the 
essence of any era must be emotional; that, for in- 
stance, when the compelling intellectual construc- 
tions of the past hundred years shall in the future 
have been demolished or made over, certain gains of 
the human heart therefrom will remain and become 
clear. The indissoluble quality, the raw material, 
of human life is emotional energy. The effect of 
intellectual and moral forces is to give shape and 
direction to this; the function of artistic literature 
is to phrase the result in comparatively durable 
symbols. 

The history of literature — that is, of mankind's 
emotional energy under the moulding influences of 

13 



1 4 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

successive stages of culture — shows us that this en- 
ergy, when most effectual for civilized progress, fol- 
lows two strong tendencies operating in close con- 
junction with each other. One is dualistic: it ac- 
centuates and energizes all the contrasts of life from 
the meanest to the highest. The other is monistic: 
it seeks a unity beneath every pair of contrasts. 
Each of the two tendencies thus reacts upon the 
other and fosters it, urging life toward its richest 
development through an ever ascending pursuit of 
contrast and harmony. The culminating and most 
inclusive phase of this process is the sense of "two 
worlds", one outward and immediate, the other in- 
ward and transcendent; strongly in contrast with 
each other, yet moving in a certain fundamental 
harmony. 

Whatever else it may be, this process is in its es- 
sence emotional. Channels for it are laid by the 
dialectic intellect, — by the mind divorced, in a more 
or less degree, from emotional reality. The intel- 
lect obeys the omnific law of contrast and harmony 
in restricted fashion. It isolates a special series of 
contrasts — in the region of theology, or natural 
science, or some field falling between these two oppo- 
site poles — which it can solve in a limited principle 
of unity. While therefore it shapes and tends to 
clarify the emotional life, it must also divide and 
hem it into grooves, like channels in the bed of a 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 15 

stream. When the emotional life approaches a high 
level, as in the great age of Greece and during the 
First and Second Renaissance, it rises above this 
channeled network and strives to cover the whole 
stream-bed. The more we contemplate such ages 
the more assured we become that human nature 
then sought, and won in an exceptional degree, a 
certain wholeness of action. This phenomenon has 
never found an adequate name, though those who 
were under the spell of it constantly sought one. 
Witness the peculiar denotation of the term "rea- 
son" for certain Second Renaissance writers: it in- 
dicated that rise of the emotional life, through but 
beyond the moulds of intellect, which I tried to 
describe above under an inadequate figure. 

The striving for fullness of life in those ages was 
a central impetus transmitting vigor on into many 
isolative channels of thought and practical endeavor, 
which thus benefited from it even while disqualify- 
ing it. But its own peculiar and intimate sign wa;> 
a significant development of literature. For litera- 
ture, in so far as it becomes true art, is sensitive to 
the exact degree of emotional reality in every con- 
cept. When therefore true emotion fulfills and 
transcends the processes of the mind, great litera- 
ture results. And such literature, viewed as a 
whole, is seen to record that culminating phase 
noted above of the law of contrast and harmony. 



1 6 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

The best literature of the ages of Sophocles, 
Shakespeare, and Goethe illuminates, almost apo- 
theosizes, our immediate world; but even in so do- 
ing, throws it into a keenly felt contrast with "the 
other world"; and seeks, implicitly or deliberately, 
to represent the harmony in which the two are felt 
to move. 

It is now easy for us to see that the Middle Ages 
at their darkest and the eighteenth century were 
times when the emotional life was subsiding, rather 
than rising, in its intellectual grooves. It is less 
easy to realize that our own time belongs in the same 
category: for the age's eye is busy with the amaz- 
ingly complex network of channels which life has 
now developed, and is out of focus for estimating 
the level of the total stream. But as a matter of 
historical fact the situation is this: In the Middle 
Ages human life, under the ever present urge of the 
law of contrast and harmony, undertook a restricted 
fulfillment of this law by means of other-worldly 
dialectic. Our age, with the aid of this-worldly 
dialectic, has passed to the other extreme; and fu- 
ture generations, looking back on us, will experience 
the same sense of ebb and confinement as when they 
contemplate the Middle Ages and the eighteenth 
century. 



Ill 



WE should realize that the this-worldly 
forces called into activity during the 
Renaissance, and thereafter devel- 
oping continually in spite of certain 
counter tides, have approached their logical culmina- 
tion only in our day* They have done so through 
the fostering action of democracy on the one hand, 
and of natural science on the other. Democracy 
means the definitive rise of the average man as an 
important factor in civilization. The emotional life 
of the average man is not rich, and may easily be 
directed by external influences into some restricted 
channel, theological or otherwise. The discovery of 
America, the growth of commerce and presently of 
industry^ the ensuing philosophic generalizations of 
economics, socialism, and so on — these have consti- 
tuted a homogeneous influence focussing his atten- 
tion more and more upon purely mundane relation- 
ships. Within the past fifty years the process has 
culminated: the "people," now sufficiently capable 
of rational thinking, have become dominated by what 
may be called the economic view of the universe. 

A parallel development has gone on in the realm 
of natural science, which the Renaissance reani- 

17 



1 8 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

mated. Astronomy, physics, and chemistry were 
comparatively remote from the life of the people. 
But in the nineteenth century biology and geology, 
by expounding people's bodies and the earth they 
grew from, could produce a powerful moulding 
effect on the general mind. This effect was in the 
same general direction as the economic influence, and 
during the past fifty years has become definitively 
amalgamated with it. The labor of men's hands and 
minds is now seen as the refined extension of the 
forces found at work in nature. The scientist Hux- 
ley, uttering the following specious words to an audi- 
ence of working-men in 1868, is a symbol of this 
junction of two dominant and parallel interests: — 
"I weigh my words well when I assert that the man 
who should know the true history of the bit of 
chalk which every carpenter carries about in his 
breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, 
is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its 
ultimate results, to have a truer and therefore a 
better conception of this wonderful universe, and of 
man's relation to it, than the most learned student 
who is deep in the records of humanity and ignorant 
of those of Nature." The view of life here sug- 
gested, in which the records of man's other-worldly 
thought and emotion are submerged, and the inter- 
ests of a semi-enlightened working democracy are 
hinged upon natural forces, may be conveniently 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 19 

termed "demonaturalism." 

The forces that fostered demonaturalism have 
gradually submerged those movements which, dur- 
ing the past four centuries, have endeavored to con- 
serve the best development of other-worldly emotion 
won by the Middle Ages. The successive efforts in 
this direction of Protestantism and its offshoots have 
obviously descended the scale of emotional energy. 
In the atmosphere of the past half century a revival 
comparable to Methodism would obviously have 
been impossible. Christian Science, which in this 
country has had such notable success in proselytizing, 
owes its distinctive vitality not to its other-worldly 
monism but to what it has absorbed from demonat- 
uralism. And this fact signalizes what has happen- 
ed to institutional Christianity (in its extramedieval 
forms) as a whole. It has ceased more and more t& 
be a public force i or other-worldliness ; and its prac- 
tical ethics, during our time, have continually coal- 
esced significantly with the ethics of demonaturalism. 
Hence, by way of reaction, there have appeared such 
phenomena as the cultivation of Buddhistic mysti- 
cism in western lands: a re-groping for the other- 
worldly motivation of conduct, for the star of the 
wise men of the East. 

But modern institutional Christianity, unlike the 
ancient and medieval forms of religion, has never 
become identified with the central course of civili- 



20 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

zation. This passed through the Renaissance, and 
through the Second Renaissance which resumed and 
endeavored to carry forward its work. In the Ren- 
aissance at its best, the other-worldly motivation 
developed by the Middle Ages was preserved in the 
realm of conduct and revived in the realm of beauty ; 
the Second Renaissance endeavored more distinctive- 
ly to carry it also into the realm of philosophic truth. 
The Renaissance was no doubt somewhat hampered 
by fleshliness. But the Second Renaissance was 
blockaded powerfully by the gathering forces of 
demonaturalism. To this conflict, which split the 
nineteenth century into two camps, is attributable 
much of the extremeness often appearing in the 
works of the chief writers: the deliberate abstrac- 
tion and often thin remoteness of Wordsworth, Em- 
erson, and Shelley from a world that was "too much 
with us"; or on the other hand, the stains and dust 
of battle in the work of such as Carlyle. Carlyle 
was eminently characteristic of the Victorian stage 
of the Second Renaissance in his desire to affect the 
new audience, the "people", with his thunders against 
the tightening worldliness of demonatural ethics. 
But the cultural movement of which he was so 
ungracious an exponent has been cut under by the 
one he opposed, as a w r ave by a hard undertow. 

Hence the decline of literature, during the past 
fifty years, in practically all departments. Taste 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 21 

and technique have advanced in some departments; 
but there has been a general shrinkage in substance- 
value. Nevertheless our most characteristic writ- 
ers (I am leaving out of account men like Bridges, 
Phillips, and so on, who continued the paling Vic- 
torian vein) have been exceptionally conscious of 
extending human emotion in many directions pre- 
viously neglected, under the guidance of certain con- 
cepts more reliable than those their predecessors had 
access to. They have failed to perceive that these 
concepts derive from a restrictive system of dialectic 
thought, demonaturalism, which denotes a shrinkage 
of the emotional life just as decisive as that denoted 
by Deism in the eighteenth century. It should be 
added that the literature of our age has a mystic 
strain of its own. But this, like the religious phe- 
nomena noted above, has evinced either the thinness 
of extraneity or an ambiguous vitality produced by 
assimilation to demonaturalism. 

Our Demos, which during the Middle Ages was 
being lured by narrow heavenly gleams to draw out 
from the morass of barbarism, has just now advanced 
sufficiently to bend its energy effectively upon cul- 
tivating the firm earth, and not sufficiently "to hoe 
the dream in with the dung" (if I may wrest from 
its context a phrase of Mr. Percy Mackaye's). Its 
attitude toward life has permeated the age, reducing 
the supreme modes of thought and lending to those 



22 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

which are restricted enough to harmonize with its 
own a certain earthly vigor. Life has been restric- 
ted, more definitively than ever before, to its sheer 
this-worldly terms. So that though the stream of 
civilized energy, so to speak, be bulkier than ever 
before and have spread itself through a wider net- 
work of channels, its total level is lower now than 
it has been during certain earlier periods. In other 
words, our capacity for central cultural progress is 
less now than it was during the height of the Second 
Renaissance. 

Yet the sense of progress and the idea of progress 
have remained extraordinarily prominent. This 
paradox is illuminated when we recall a certain 
hoary trick of destiny. After every great creative 
movement of the human heart in the past, the idea 
which it vitalized has remained for a while like the 
outline of a motion-picture in which the light is 
gradually dimming, — so gradually that the audience 
sits at gaze, until suddenly the screen turns blank, 
and perhaps an outbreak of fire in the theatre inti- 
mates that something has gone wrong with the cur- 
rent supplying the lantern. Upon the subsidence of 
the Renaissance movement, its best idea, that of con- 
duct completing itself harmoniously in humane 
beauty, seemed to live on in the Neo-Latin conven- 
tionalism, ethical and artistic, of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. The predominant cult of the time was not ade- 






Our Progress-Idea and the War 23 

quately aware that a glory had faded, and constantly 
patronized the Renaissance in a manner to amuse later 
generations. Quite parallel is the attitude, com- 
mon at present, toward the Second Renaissance; in 
England, and partly in America, one of its specific 
manifestations is an extreme anti- Victorian ism 
which will amuse our successors. The progress- 
idea of the Second Renaissance has persisted. But 
it has degenerated into a cult concept and has lost 
true vitality in the same manner as the Renaissance 
idea in the eighteenth century. It has not main- 
tained the full tide of emotional energy which a 
century ago was setting into it. 



IV 



THERE can be no general recognition of 
this situation so long as the general eye 
wears the film of superficial rationality 
which demonaturalism has drawn over 
it. Our age, unlike the eighteenth century, is 
keenly aware of the past, and takes the awareness 
for comprehension. We of Germany, England, 
and America have not repudiated that which in- 
spired Goethe, Wordsworth, and Emerson. We 
acknowledge it. The multitudinous average man, 
who through the agency of the democratic college 
or the printing-press has been educated beyond the 
secondary school stage, has a fair grasp of its posi- 
tion in "the development of our race." He knows 
that the earlier nineteenth century opened a range 
of grand ideas for the race. He believes that a 
certain haze, intellectual and emotional, which at 
first surrounded them has now been dissipated; that 
the essentials remain, with necessary adjustments 
which have enabled us to follow progress on firm 
ground. This smug attitude of mind is difficult of 
conversion. The present War may do as much for 
the demonaturalism of Europe as the French Revo- 
lution did for the politer rationalism of the eigh- 

24 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 25 

teenth century; but the converting effect of war- 
fare may easily be overestimated. America, in any 
case, may remain comparatively somnolent. Par- 
ticularly we in America, then, should probe the 
progress-idea which we have nourished in common 
with Europe, and become clearly aware of the 
change w T hich has overtaken it in our age. 

True to the dualistic constitution of human na- 
ture, the Second Renaissance at its best realized 
that the modern conception of progress should give 
full scope to the eternal motive-desire for contrast 
and unity; that it should assume and further edify 
our persistent sense of two worlds distinct but es- 
sentially in harmony. With this sense, the chief 
authors strove to connect the rising consciousness of 
progress, of supernational solidarity, of mankind's 
relation to nature. They believed that beneath the 
ties which humanity was capable of weaving across 
national divisions, was to be recognized the working 
of an other-worldly entity, which underlay also the 
relationships between man and nature. On this 
second score Emerson's view may be cited, as wide- 
ly typical. Man and nature, for him, rose from a 
single source and exhibited a constant correspond- 
ence. The special value of nature for man was 
that it presented for his contemplation the universe 
in simplified form, "as the city of God" in which 
"there is no citizen." To perceive the inevitability 



26 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

of law in that primitive and comparatively obvious 
sphere, was to be trained for the higher and more 
difficult task of perceiving it in the moral sphere 
distinctive of mankind. But only in the develop- 
ment of his own characteristic morality could man 
truly progress or "evolve." 

The representative authors were also keenly 
aware, at their best, of the danger that human 
progress might be conceived as a flux in which noth- 
ing for certain could remain. They dwelt upon 
the harmonies underlying life's shifting contrasts, 
upon the fact that human evolution meant the fuller 
and fuller realization of a spiritual realm which it- 
self was stable. In 1852, when a different concep- 
tion had become current, Carlyle wrote that, 
though certainly an unprecedented revolution in 
human affairs had been coming about, "The great 
Galileo, or numerous small Galileos, have appeared 
in our spiritual world also, and are making known 
to us that the sun stands still; that as for the sun 
and stars and eternal immensities, they do not 
move at all . . . that it is we and our dog- 
hutch that are moving all this while, giving rise to 
such phenomena; that if we would ever be wise 
about our situation we must now attend to that 
fact." 

Of central importance was the insistence upon 
moral evolution in the individual life as the basis 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 27 

of all progress. "What are the convulsions of a 
city compared with the convulsions of a soul?" ex- 
claims Hugo, than who no writer of the time was 
more tensely sympathetic to the revolution which 
was remaking the political and social body of man- 
kind in Europe; "man is verily a greater profundity 
than the people.' ' Les Miser ables, melodramatic 
and sometimes absurd as it is, will remain the criter- 
ion of novels until novelists learn to surpass its 
concrete representation of an individual soul bat- 
tling to realize its complete moral possibilities. 
From this book one's memory passes to scores of 
other Second Renaissance works which strove to 
embody the same conception. Tennyson's intima- 
tion that it was Goethe who had impressed him 
with the truth on which In Memoriam is founded, 

"That men may rise on stepping stones 
Of their dead selves to higher things," 

is suggestive of the degree in which the leading 
authors of various nations were preoccupied with 
this old steadying subject of thought. They stood 
on the conviction, moreover, that though the rational 
intelligence was to be regarded as the special and 
hard won heritage of the modern individual, and 
the surest implement for his development, neverthe- 
less this development itself was essentially a preter- 



28 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

rational process, an eduction of power from the 
other world into this. Love, conceived as a dis- 
tinctly spiritual force projected into natural condi- 
tions, was constantly treated as the main means of 
this process. Browning's representation of progress 
in the individual life — accomplished mainly in su- 
preme converting moments through the agency of 
a love which, in Browning, is sometimes all too ir- 
rational — is to be regarded, not as a break with 
the evolutionary conception of progress predominant 
with other authors of the Second Renaissance, but 
as an extreme development from it, fostered by this 
poet's vigorous and instinctive reaction from the 
growing naturalism which he found around him. 



SUCH was the conception of progress which, 
though finding its richest expression in liter- 
ature, was moving in the general mind dur- 
ing the Second Renaissance and striving to 
realize itself there. The ghost of it remains to-day. 
The progress-idea still involves the conception of a 
reality transcending national and other divisions, and 
connecting man w r ith nature. For this reality old 
names have often been retained, as "soul" and "spir- 
it" in Swinburne and others, suggesting the mystic 
regard which still attaches to it; but by growing 
preference, and with less ambiguity, it is referred to 
as "life" or "nature." In any case it stands for the 
life of nature extended in mankind and monistic in 
its mode of operation. For this entity, the Pagan 
"Earth" was felicitously revived by George Mere- 
dith, in the instinctive attempt to find a term which 
could denote human and natural life in one. The 
same phenomenon is back of Swinburne's "Hertha." 
But Meredith deserves especial attention, for though 
he has not in any marked degree reached the pop- 
ular favor, he has become the poets' poet and the 
novelists' novelist, a great power behind the throne 
of literary demonaturalism. In his poetry Meredith 

29 



30 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

seeks to obviate the old bi-worldly conception of 
life, which he deems outworn. He several times 
uses the words "God" and "soul," but thins their old 
antithetic signification to a shadow. God has no 
real meaning apart from Earth : 

"She can lead us, only she, 
Unto God's foot-stool, whither she reaches." 

"Soul" he treats as a transient aspect of spirit which, 
in turn, is for him coterminous with the life of 
Earth: "For Earth that gives the milk, the spirit 
gives." Human progress, according to Meredith 
and his colleagues in England and other nations, is 
essentially the evolution of Earth. 

She is restless for change, always "quick at her 
wheel," as Meredith puts it. Here is the root of the 
unexampled restlessness which pervades the litera- 
ture characteristic of our age. The restlessness 
which during the preceding age was at work in the 
fringes of literature has in our day penetrated to its 
centre, displacing contemplation of "the things which 
do not move at all." The sturdiest writers have 
borne this restlessness stoically, rejoicing in sheer 
flux as in a cold water plunge. But it has tended 
increasingly toward pessimism in their weaker breth- 
ren. One notes this in Thomas Hardy, for instance, 
when he wailingly denies the existence of the gods 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 31 

and in the same breath scolds them for their mal- 
treatment of helpless human beings. 

As for the progressive function of the individual 
man, one finds what at first seems a strangely para- 
doxical attitude toward it. In Mr. H. G. Wells' 
First and Last Things, there appears on many pages 
an extreme glorification of the individual. The 
writer might have taken for his text Emerson's "I 
will write 'whim' over the lintels of my door-post,'' 
albeit he has consistently degraded the quality of 
the whim. Here, then, we have Second Renaissance 
individualism run riot. Yet on many other pages 
appears an extremely socialistic attitude. The para- 
dox is characteristic of demonaturalism, and it is not 
difficult to solve. Progress, both in the individual 
and the race, is conceived as the evolution of natural 
desires, directed by dialectic reason. This is the 
thought which shines, for instance, in the lines of 
the revived drama, from Ibsen to Shaw, and is reflec- 
ted even in the pages of such as Bjornson who, if 
born fifty years earlier, would have been "merely 
Victorian" in their attitude toward life. According 
to this view, disconcerting influxes of emotion which 
seem to derive from a preternatural source must 
ordinarily be debarred from the field of human mo- 
tives. Yet our awareness of the past renders ines- 
capable the fact that many great individuals who 
have spurred human progress were inspired by just 



32 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

such influxes: their work is not conceivable as the 
normal result of Earth plus rationality. We must 
regard them, therefore, as useful variants: not as 
persons who, according to the old view, carried to 
a high level that which is normally latent in average 
human nature, but as splendid abnormalities. But 
some of us, too, — including Mr. Wells, — may feel 
within ourself the urge of some splendidly abnormal 
impulse. Since it derives from Nature, it is poten- 
tially good. Then let us give it considerable rein, 
for the sake of self-development and the possible 
good of the social body — so long as, in contemplating 
the progress of men in the mass, we steadily hold to 
the criterion derived from the commonsense ration- 
ality of the average man. Thus there is a natural 
coherence between the extremely individualistic and 
the extremely socialistic attitudes toward progress. 
Hence the conception, quite foreign to the Second 
Renaissance at its best, that the criterion for group 
or racial development may be different from that for 
the development of the individual. Demonaturalism 
shrinks from the contrast between the kind of human 
nature evinced in the highest type of individuals 
and the kind evinced by men in the mass. It has 
sought relief by following, to some extent, the ten- 
dency to arrant skepticism in regard to "Heroes" 
which Carlyle stormed against. No doubt this ten- 
dency is active ; it finds expression in the attitude of 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 33 

Shaw and others toward rare types of emotional 
life which humanity has learned to reverence. But 
the general mind soon recognizes such an attitude 
as abnormal since, as Carlyle himself pointed out, 
it too blatantly offends the instincts of humanity. 
But deep roots have been struck by the other ten- 
dency : that of assuming, consciously or not, that the 
criterion for individuals may be higher than the cri- 
terion for general progress. 

The literature of our age has been immensely 
conscious of Demos ; it has reflected in unprecedented 
fashion the state of mind of the average man. This 
means a great deal more than the fact that for two 
centuries there has been steady growth of the popu- 
lar novel and other literature designed for the taste 
of the people. It means that there has come about 
a crucial shift of thought in regard to human pro- 
gress. The vision of the prophet, priest, and king is 
conceded as an historical fact but discredited as a 
real criterion. The appeal for judgment is to the 
average state of mind. When Swinburne, Mere- 
dith, Wells, Shaw, and the others ridicule the 
romantic visions of the Second Renaissance and glor- 
ify, in contrast, what they call brain, commonsense, 
and so on, they refer to the average thinking of 
human society stimulated by the natural desires com- 
mon to us all. The failure of Meredith's novels to 
be artistic wholes, is in a large measure due to his 



34 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

insistent urging of the human average into a role 
which it cannot fill: for example, in the cases of 
Janet in Harry Richmond and Redworth in Diana. 
The term love has accordingly shifted its denota- 
tion. Recent writers of France, Germany, and Eng- 
land have concentrated their thought and imagina- 
tion, to a degree unparallelled in literary history, 
upon the sheerly natural aspects of love. They 
have deemed, too, that as man is naturally sexual so 
he is naturally friendly, and desires, in a considera- 
ble measure, the good of his neighbor. Affection, 
sexual and fraternal, is among the strongest of nat- 
ural forces. If we can learn to guide its impulses 
with free but rational skill, the result will be prog- 
ress, with individual happiness, international peace, 
and other desirable concomitants. 



VI 



ITS love has been one of the weakest ele- 
ments of demonaturalism. On the one hand, 
it has encouraged certain anti-social vagaries 
which are condemned by the commonsense of 
demonaturalism itself, but which indicate a certain 
rankness in the soil. On the other hand, it has 
thickened those vapors of pseudo-democratic hu- 
manitarianism and pacifism which have obscured for 
so many people, not only the question of true honor 
and justice, but those very facts of international life 
which the spirit of the time felt itself competent to 
deal with. This kind of love, because of its inher- 
ent weakness, has been most submerged in that 
country which has brought the demonatural pro- 
gress-idea as a whole to its firmest development, 
namely Germany. That country has completely 
and frankly distrusted the value of demonatural af- 
fectionateness in the sphere of international politics; 
Anglo-Saxondom has distrusted it very considerably 
and without frankness. This difference between 
Germany and other lands is slight, however, when 
compared with deeper resemblances. 

By reason of its supreme vitality, Germany took 
the lead in the idealistic movement of a century 

35 



36 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

ago, and gave the world preeminent philosophers 
and the chief poet of the time. The same vitality 
diverted into * new channels made Germany the 
leader in the demonaturalist movement of our age. 
But the close relation between the present state of 
German culture and our own is obscured for the 
average Anglo-Saxon by his naive proclivity for 
identifying democracy with certain political forms 
and modes which have become regnant in England 
and America but not in Germany. These, how- 
ever, are partial and quite possibly not permanent 
manifestations of that which constitutes the irre- 
fragable essence of democracy: the rise of the aver- 
ge man into the function of a shaping factor in civ- 
ilization. In Germany the average man has done 
more thinking during the past fifty years than he 
has in other lands, and has had a larger determi- 
nant effect on national culture. He has been freer 
from submissive reverence for the higher humanity 
emanating from rare men, and for the noblest cri- 
teria for human life which have been accumulated 
during history. He has more actively and con- 
sciously assimilated the mediocre insights of demo- 
naturalism. Witness, for instance, the popularity 
in Germany of Haeckel's atheistic "Monism." It 
was level with the rational capacity of the working- 
man of Germany; it would have been above that 
capacity in America. Quite similar in significance 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 37 

was the pseudo-aristocratic philosophy of Nietzsche. 
His superman is a distillation of the desires and 
capabilities of the recent average man, with his ani- 
mal blood beating high, with his newly conscious 
mentality bent on self-exploitation, with his blind- 
ness to great moral antitheses. The same quite 
bourgeois superman is adumbrated in the pages of 
Shaw, Wells, and others, including that sturdy de- 
monaturalist poet whom we had the honor of pro- 
ducing in the dawn of the age, Walt Whitman. In 
the economic sphere, one needs no reminder that 
during the past half century Germany became the 
chief exponent of the material astuteness and am- 
bition of the average man. That the situation in 
the political sphere is similar, is just now being 
forced home to the American mind by accumulating 
evidences of the state of public opinion in Ger- 
many. The German government owes its amaz- 
ing efficiency, and also its amazing obliviousness of 
certain humane considerations, to its supreme ca- 
pacity for interpreting and using the average popu- 
lar state of mind. Thus Germany was able uni- 
tedly and effectually to follow our prevailing idea 
of progress, while Anglo-Saxondom, until recently, 
awarded her more and more applause and emula- 
tion. 



VII 

THE conception of progress outlined 
above has at once its result and its refu- 
tation in the present war. In the first 
instance all the new sinews of war, and 
certain palpable motives, have been provided by 
demonaturalism. Nevertheless this movement, in 
Germany as elsewhere, has been centrally and sin- 
cerely opposed to war. What is the solution of 
this paradox? The solution most current just now 
is that the War is the result of a failure, preemi- 
nently on the part of Germany, completely to ap- 
prehend and follow the main spirit of our age. In- 
terpreting this we may say that the War proceeded 
from the demonatural progress-idea, indeed, but 
from a fatally partial interpretation or misvision 
of it. If the War were only this, one might hope 
that when the misvision has been corrected we may 
have sound international relations and permanent 
peace. But one must recognize more plainly every 
day that, though demonaturalist in its more obvious 
motives and its material sinews, the War does not 
derive from this source its grand sustaining power. 
The immense emotional energy which is moving 
the ships and armies of Europe, and shows no sign 

38 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 39 

of flagging, is a riddle to the demonaturalist intel- 
lect. The War has drawn its main strength from 
energies not comprehended by the time-spirit. Hence 
the general consciousness that this war is very dif- 
ferent in quality from those of the past two cen- 
turies, that it is an extraordinary anomaly at the 
present time, that it has something in common with 
medieval warfare. Actually, the War is the com- 
plement of the religious warfare of old days. Su- 
perficially actuated by a spirit of this-worldliness as 
extreme and abnormal as the other-worldly impetus 
of the Crusades, this War, like the Crusades but in 
the opposite direction, has given violent and reliev- 
ing expression to emotional energies discountenanced 
by the dominant dogma of the time. The Crusades 
drew their sustaining energy from a wide-spread 
worldly love of adventure and fighting, ordinarily 
not sanctioned by the Church; the present war 
draws its sustaining energy from a widespread oth- 
er-worldly devotion to national spirit, ordinarily 
not sanctioned by demonaturalism. In each case 
the formulated faith of the time provided merely 
the shape and direction, — the stream-bed in which 
the widespread energy could accumulate, and from 
which it could overflow into war. 

How the demonatural idea of progress has cut the 
way for international struggles should be clearly evi- 
dent. Our age has had dinned in its ears the fact 



40 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

that Nature achieves progress through the competi- 
tion of species. In our human case the species are 
nations; and we should aim to develop them by 
efficient cooperation with the laws of nature in ali 
spheres of corporate activity. But in employing we 
must also improve upon the method of nature — so 
runs the creed. We must do so by completely mas- 
tering the use of that superb tool which marks the 
climax of nature's achievement — the tool by means 
of which nature corrects herself — namely, the human 
rational intelligence. This is teaching us that the 
internecine warfare of nature is far below the true 
level of her great offspring, and that economically 
and in many other ways it arrests our development. 
Rational cooperation among nations is essential to 
the highest development of each, and to that of man- 
kind as a whole. Ultimately the individual nation is 
of value only in so far as it contributes to the pro- 
gress of our greatest species, mankind. Here is the 
chief object of our loyalty, the ultimate motive of all 
our living. 

"Enough of light is this for one life's span, 
That all men are born mortal, but not man ; 
And we men bring death lives by night to sow, 
That men may reap and eat and live by day." 

(Swinburne). 

But as an ultimate object of loyalty, mankind, in 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 41 

the demonatural conception of it, could not possibly 
prove adequate. This function has never in actual- 
ity been fulfilled by a mankind reduced to its natural 
and this-worldly terms, and cannot be even now 
when there beckons ahead of us a future mankind 
with all its capacities raised to the highest degree. 
Swayed by the deepest law of progress, the law of 
contrast and harmony, a people can give its ultimate 
and strongest loyalty only to what it feels to be pre- 
terhuman and preternatural. The tribe or nation, 
not mankind, has always been and is now more than 
ever the social entity which most successfully meets 
this condition. Here, then, is the real solution of 
our paradox, of the fact that the age which has cul- 
tivated, more deliberately than any preceding age, 
the idea of serving mankind through a true inter- 
national spirit, has produced the direst outbreak of 
nationalism that the world has yet seen. Demonat- 
uralism has urged: "Develop the nation, but do so 
in the service of our new god, Mankind." Demos 
has responded vigorously ; but in fulfilling the man- 
date to develop the nation, has added, "Come, when 
in the mood for worship let us worship here also: 
the old god is more real than the new." 

Though especially prominent in Germany, this 
other-worldly spirit of nationalism was at work be- 
fore the War also in the other leading nations en- 
gaged. The conflict has been simply bringing it into 



42 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

full activity in each nation. Its marks in recent Ger- 
man literature have come before the world's eye ; its 
increasing influence in the literature of other nations 
will presently be studied more carefully. Professor 
J. A. Cramb's Germany and England, published in 
England before the War, is characteristic. Its 
gloomy lack of faith in the highest human emotions 
is obviously the result of the confining pressure 
exerted upon the author by our demonaturalist age. 
The craving to break through this confinement is 
obviously the source of his militaristic nationalism 
with its conscious and deliberate note of other-world- 
liness. Much of Rupert Brooke's poetry exhibits 
the confining conceits of demonaturalism ; glad 
sense of a national outlet from this view of life rings 
in his war sonnets. The semi-religious nationalism 
which was rising in French fiction before the War, 
in reaction from the spirit of the age, has been com- 
mented on in the columns of various journals. I can- 
not here multiply examples. Suffice to say that an 
other-worldly nationalism, taking shape within the 
demonatural shell and breaking through it, is a liter- 
ary phenomenon of our age which will interest the 
future historian. 



VIII 

THE War, then, has flowed up from 
emotional energies far deeper than the 
control of our age. And yet it seems to 
the public mind, particularly in Amer- 
ica, the result merely of a misvision which can be 
reabsorbed, as it were, and corrected by the spirit of 
our age. The multifarious planning for the establish- 
ment of a true internationalism after the War, re- 
mains essentially of the same quality as it was before 
the War began, and is dominated by the demonatural 
ethic. This ethic is ineradicably monistic. It strives 
to identify national with international interests. It 
urges that any clash between these interests is only 
apparent, not real, and can be completely overcome 
by the exercise of dialectic intelligence. But the 
old national ethic, which has been steadily develop- 
ing since the days of the tribal god and will have 
been immensely strengthened by the present war, 
is much more in tune with the law of life. It ren- 
ders the individual man strongly aware of the con- 
trast between his personal interests and those of his 
nation, at the same time making him feel the pres- 
ence of an underlying harmony which is not reduc- 
ible to terms of this world. It will draw the full 

43 



44 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

sweep of his emotional and therefore material sup- 
port, whenever there arises a decisive clash between 
the interests of the nation and those of whatever 
supernational entity can be created by demonatural 
ethics. 

The demonatural notion that commercial mater- 
ialism acts as a permanent ethical force to prevent 
war should by now have disappeared s in view of 
what has happened in Europe. But the notion as 
applied to America still obtains widely in this coun- 
try, partly on account of our present Government's 
endeavor, with unexampled patience, to keep clear 
of the European struggle; mainly, however, under 
the unconscious assumption that political human 
nature is shaped differently here. As a matter of 
fact commercial materialism, here and everywhere, 
works in the opposite direction. First, it makes 
people underestimate the motivating power of 
national emotion; this effect is apparent at present 
in American views respecting the causes of the War, 
their essential remoteness from us, the possible dur- 
ation of the War, and so on. Secondly, it renders 
them all the more helpless in the grasp of this emo- 
tion when strong international differences arise ; this 
effect was apparent here at the outbreak of the Span- 
ish-American War, and would become suddenly 
active again if our Government should break with 
Germany. One may help to clear his mind of the 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 45 

ethical delusion in regard to commercial materialism 
by considering, side by side, the following two edi- 
torial utterances on the subject of economic wealth, 
one from a leading American and the other from a 
leading German newspaper. The demonaturalist 
conception of progress appears, in the first extract, 
under conditions of peace ; in the second, under con- 
ditions of war and superheated with the emotion of 
self-sacrificing patriotism. (1) "Business manage- 
ment, morals, and conduct are on a higher level than 
ever before, and there is more co-operation between 
all classes of people, a recognition to a greater degree 
than ever before that it is to the advantage of each 
to have all others prosper. All the wealth there is 
counts for little beside the wealth that shall be. The 
creation of new wealth, a new abundance greater 
than the world has ever known, is easily within the 
capacity of our institutions and of our organization 
of industry." (2) "We must husband our 
resources, and at the same time promote their most 
rapid development. We must learn to build fleets 
in as many months as it formerly took years. We 
must form serviceable armies, and out of compara- 
tively inefficient material. With prisoners and ma- 
chines we must sow our fields, work our mines, 
increase our production of war material. We must 
put to work thousands of heads and hands that have 
heretofore been unproductive. We must check our 



46 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

luxury in arts and sciences which only beautify. We 
must reshape our forces, and direct everything to 
the attainment of our great aim." One observes 
that "the great aim" is in the first extract limited 
and shallow, in the second limited and temporarily 
noble. But each author is liable, under exchanged 
conditions, to the nationalism of the other. 

The spirit of nationalism will come out of this 
war stronger than ever; and the two grand forces 
of our day, democracy and science, will continue as 
heretofore to hew grooves for it and to fail in com- 
prehending it. These two forces are obviously far 
from having run their full gamut in human devel- 
opment. Science, as it continues its conquests, will 
continue its effect of over emphasizing in the pub- 
lic mind the function and scope of sheer reason. 
As democracy proceeds — that is, as the social and 
political significance of the average man increases — 
it will widen our long modern task of learning to 
think scientifically and to make proper use, at the 
same time, of the strongest emotions. Scientific 
commonsense will deprecate excessive nationalism, 
construct international laws, and prepare arms and 
armies. Democratic humanitarianism will continue, 
in the United States and everywhere, to prate 
about mankind and international good-will based 
upon the interests of all. The contemned other- 
worldly emotion will ever and anon shoot up 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 47 

astouiidingly through its national outlets, and turn 
to cruel or noble follies. From scientific and demo- 
cratic politics, then, will come small help for what 
we need: namely, the moulding of political emotion 
into a true supernational mode. 

But from organized religion and from education 
firm help will come when we have set ourselves 
patiently and humbly to draw it forth. Education 
may be weaned gradually from the demonaturalist 
notions on which for some years it has been too 
largely feeding, and deliberately made a means of 
upbuilding a real supernational spirit. Pertinent 
adjustments may be effected in individual studies 
such as political and literary history. But the cen- 
tral need is for the construction of a humane curri- 
culum, — an organic arrangement of studies which 
shall have at least as much correspondence with the 
scale of human values as the medieval and classical 
curricula which our age has finally demolished but 
scarcely begun to replace. I shall confine myself 
to a single specific suggestion. 

The secondary school curriculum (which is now 
perhaps the most potent influence shaping the Euro- 
pean and American Demos) should have at the cen- 
tre of it a certain course in ethics. The theme of 
this course should be that prime social virtue which 
has so far won no single current name, but which 
may be designated intelligibly enough as a true 



48 Our Progress-Idea and the War 

fusion of justice and amity. This virtue should 
be held before the pupil as something which may 
and must be more and more clearly apprehended by 
the human mind; as something which nevertheless 
cannot be comprehended and actualized through the 
mere exercise of our rationality; as something not 
invented by human society but superimposed upon 
it, for arduous fulfillment, by God (assuming that 
this discredited term may after a time be rehabili- 
tated in the sphere of education.) The teacher's 
main endeavor would be to designate concretely the 
workings of this virtue by calling into requisition 
the student's knowledge of biography, literature, 
history and other humane studies. The result 
would be that the youth would gain a real even 
though weak grasp of a sound criterion to guide 
his feelings in approaching the manifold specialties of 
present day public life. He would be prepared to 
question pacifism and militarism, sentimental demo- 
cratism and scientific bureaucratism, and all other 
specialisms fostered by the demonaturalist spirit, as 
to the degree in which each is capable of advancing 
amity and justice in fusion. He would in a meas- 
ure be immune from the shallow conception of evo- 
lutionary progress which has so widely pervaded 
the education, the literature, and the general think- 
ing of our time. He would learn to view public 
progress, not as a cubic increase and extending 



Our Progress-Idea and the War 49 

ramification of the stream of life, but as a rise in 
the total level of justice and amity. 

That the progress-idea as shaped by our age has 
quickened the extension of hospital facilities, the 
diffusion of sanitary arrangements, the bettering of 
labor conditions, the lessening of the drink evil, and 
so on, may be admitted without confuting the 
proposition I have been following: namely, that 
this idea has meant, not a new vision, but a reduc- 
tion of the Second Renaissance vision of progress. 
When the chief driving-force of life, human emo- 
tion, has been drawn out from the conflicting 
trenches which have been dug for it by the demo- 
natural view of progress, it will begin to reanimate 
and reshape the preternatural conception of Goethe 
and his chief contemporaries. 



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